Recap: International TYPO3 Camp Mallorca

This time from september 12th to 14th. A „No, too far“ was not acceptable after returning from Taiwan recently. So it was a quick decision to join this event in Mallorca.

Leaving the plane, the weather in Mallorca was just awesome. 30°C sunshine compared to 12°C rain when we departed in germany.

I went there with my friend Sascha a little earlier. We used the time to walk the neighborhood, checking out the local stores and cousine. We found a little Tapas restaurant, where we then went almost every day. They – as well as our hotel – seemed to have a favour for classic rock music, which we pretty much enjoyed. 🙂

In the evening the warmup session took place. Local cousine and free drinks. Very delicious. Even though a majority of visitors came from D-A-CH, english was the major language and was used all the way to keep the international spirit up. I must say, I really enjoyed the food and appreciated, that primarily local food was served.

Saturday and sunday the barcamp sessions were planned. I was primarily looking forward to Neos sessions, but only a few took place, so we used the time to evaluate a blank Neos 1.1.2 installation on Windows8.1 which actually worked after some stuggle with symbolic links and the Microsoft rights management. Other sessions were about self organization and team building, providing some interesting summaries.

Regarding Neos I had the most benefit talking to Saskia, a passionate Neos developer, and by attending her session. BTW: thanks for tollerating my Composer and CLI ranting that evening. 😉

The current state of Neos seems really ready for „smaller“ sites. Smaller not in sense of page count but in complex featureset, since some enterprise features are still missing. The current featureset looks mature though. Especially impressing I found the ContentType-TypoScript-Fluid configuration management. It allows to create individual editorial websites without the need of coding PHP. Good news: Multilinguality is on the way. It may most problably be called „Content Dimensions“ and will be more versatile.

Sunday I held a session on „outsourcing development“. It was very spontanously, so there are no slides unfortunately. 🙁

I basicly wrapped up my successful approach from former times. Hearing the voices from the other participants strengthend my understanding of „the right way“. Problems can be eliminated if the external team is not treated as a black box but included just as real on-site collegues – in all facettes.

The last session I attended was a summary of the book „Soft Skills“ concluding what a High Performance Team is and how to make it happen. Situative leadership and a degree of freedom for high performers as a motor of quality and innovation … I think I have to read it for myself as well.

The camp was great. I had some very interesting discussions and got some new insights. The TYPO3 community and its Camp culture really keeps the spirit rolling. I’m overwhelmed once more every time.